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 shouldering in between them with: "I wonder, Billie, if you and Count Eckstrom won't excuse Mr. Harrington after all—at least for a moment. I have just remembered an important instruction that I want to give him."

Count Eckstrom's reception of his host's interjectory mood was the essence of good breeding. If, to a gentleman of his traditions, it was a trifle bizarre the way these Americans did mix business and social life; and if Mr. Boland, under the veil of a thin humility, was autocratic and self-indulgent to a degree, he could overlook it, since everybody indulged Mr. Boland.

"Father, you are so ridiculous!" flushed Billie. "You bring Mr. Harrington to us and then you snatch him away, before I get a chance even to ask him what all this absurd word play with the Count is about. It was too swift for me."

In truth, she was glad enough to have Harrington snatched away. Of course, this wire-haired manner of his toward the count was due solely to jealousy; he was Hellfire Harrington, she remembered; and while it piqued it also amused her; so that when Count Eckstrom took up once more the task of enthralling her mind, he found it more difficult than before.

"I—I'm groggy," confessed Harrington to Mr. Boland as his host was rather dragging him away. "And yet I—I tell you there's something phony about him; didn't you think I shook him up some? Didn't you think he betrayed himself a little?"

"You jarred him like an earthquake," opined Boland, and indulged a long low chuckle. The caverned beams with which he contemplated Harrington were benignant and highly approving.